Wednesday 25 April 2007 11.01 EDT
First published on Wednesday 25 April 2007 11.01 EDT

It's Charlie and Craig Reid of the Proclaimers! Or Craig and Charlie Reid... Or... Why do they have to wear the same clothes? Photo: Dave Hogan/Getty

Readers from south of Dumfries may be hard-pressed to give a damn about this, but it was severely disheartening for any Scots with a sense of pride in their pop-cultural history to see the Proclaimers prostrating themselves before the admittedly well-meaning charity dollar alongside Matt Lucas and Peter Kay recently.

The whole affair might have been in a good cause and enough to earn the Reid brothers - Charlie and Craig - an unlikely number one. Yet it also saw them join a shitlist of dim luminaries like Bananarama, Right Said Fred and Kim Wilde, each of whom has been pimped out to similar ends and with equivalently blatant disregard for the meaning of the word "comic". Unlike those named above, the Proclaimers sell out annual tours in their home country and, only last week, saw a large-scale touring musical based on their songs debut in Dundee. For God's sake, last year they even guest-starred on Family Guy.

When you consider Mamma Mia! (Abba), We Will Rock You (Queen) and even Daddy Cool (Boney M), it becomes apparent that only the most enduringly classic pop acts get musicals constructed in their honour. Sunshine On Leith, penned by Doctor Who and River City scriptwriter Stephen Greenhorn, shall hopefully go some way towards establishing the Proclaimers as exactly that.

Now, I come not to praise the Reids as lost musical visionaries, but to point out that they're simply a lot better than you probably remember. To be fair, their image - matching spectacles, matching stonewashed denim, matching shirts from Topman - never exactly pegged them as the sort of stars you would aspire towards being. Yet their music, its vague AOR sheen aside, makes them vastly more acceptable than most mainstream bands of their vintage.

I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles), Let's Get Married and The Joyful Kilmarnock Blues each rouse customarily passionate and surprisingly young Scots crowds to similar levels of beer-induced excitement as, say, Kaiser Chiefs might, while there's a certain folk-rooted poeticism therein as well. Letter From America, for example, is as sure-footed a treatise on patriotism as Billy Bragg ever conjured, its protagonist wondering as to the fate of transatlantic Scots émigrés while the country's industrial towns (Irvine, Linwood, Motherwell, etc) close down around him. It's that misty-eyed romanticism/bitter reality juncture that every Scots lyricist from Rabbie Burns to Bobby Gillespie knows well.

And if nothing else - as anyone who witnessed Hibernian FC's Scottish League Cup final win last month will note - Sunshine On Leith (the song) is beaten only by You'll Never Walk Alone as a tear-tugging crowd anthem. So that at least places them somewhere in between Abba and Gerry and the Pacemakers in the pantheon of pop greats.